Elon Musk’s quiet, untweeted China trip

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

We usually hear too much about what Elon Musk’s up to lately, but you may have missed the news last week that he paid a three-day visit to China and met with quite a few high-ranking government officials there.

Ever since China lifted most of its pandemic-era travel restrictions in January, foreign executives have been swarming in. And Musk had good reason to go: China is a vital part of Tesla’s electric-vehicle empire, both as a market and as a production powerhouse. But as the owner of Starlink, SpaceX, and recently Twitter, Musk has a much more complicated relationship with the country.

There’s little information in English about Musk’s China trip. That’s primarily because Musk, usually active on the social media platform he just acquired, stayed very quiet during the whole trip. While Twitter is banned in China, people have all sorts of VPN tools to access it. Still, Musk didn’t seem to want to give the impression that he was on Twitter while there. He only tweeted a single time about the trip, after he left China. In fact, he even stopped commenting on other tweets—something he normally does dozens of times every day. 

But from the public readouts posted by Chinese government websites and sightings of Musk shared on Chinese social media, we can reconstruct his trip from Tuesday to Thursday.

He had quite a busy itinerary: in 44 hours, Musk met with at least three high-level Chinese officials, dined with the CEO of the world’s largest EV battery supplier, and visited Tesla’s factory in Shanghai, among other things. 

Musk’s private jet landed in Beijing on the afternoon of May 30, local time. He met with Qin Gang, China’s new foreign minister and previous ambassador to the US, the same day. According to the ministry’s press release, Musk said in the meeting that he strongly opposes decoupling supply chains between the US and China, because the two countries are “interlinked, like conjoined twins inseparable from each other.” That evening, he had dinner with Zeng Yuqun, the CEO of CATL, which is a key supplier of batteries to Tesla cars. 

Musk holding hands with Qin Gang, China's Minister of Foreign Affairs

CHINESE MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

The next day, he met with two more Chinese ministers, those in charge of commerce and technology. Reuters reported that he also visited Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang—China’s sixth-highest-ranking party official—that afternoon, but the meeting has not been made public by the government or Musk. In the evening, he flew to Shanghai and headed to the Tesla Gigafactory, where he took photos with employees that he would later post on Twitter.

Elon and the team of the Shanghai gigafactory pose for a group photo

ELON MUSK VIA TWITTER

On the morning of June 1, his last day in China, Musk squeezed in one last meeting with Chen Jining, the Shanghai party secretary, before his jet left for Texas at 11:23 a.m.

Musk is not the first American executive to visit China this year: before him, there were Apple’s Tim Cook, General Motors’s Mary Barra, JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, Starbucks’s Laxman Narasimhan, and more. But so far, Musk has received the biggest welcome, both from Chinese government officials and from the people on Chinese social media.

The main reason is that China and Tesla have been in a mutually beneficial relationship for years. Not only is China the second-largest market for Tesla, but the Shanghai Gigafactory produced over half of Tesla cars sold globally last year. On the other end, the Shanghai factory also contributed significantly to local employment and taxation, as well as making the city a hub of EV production.

During the strict one-month lockdown in Shanghai last year, the municipal government made extra arrangements to make sure the factory could resume production even while other parts of city life were on pause. During this visit, Musk acknowledged those efforts and thanked the Chinese commerce minister.

But there are other things that complicate the relationship between Musk and China.

For one thing, Starlink has long been a concern for Beijing because of its capacity to circumvent traditional communication blackouts and offer additional satellite intelligence. Its application in Ukraine during the war, in which China largely stands on the side of Russia, has made the issue clearer. Earlier this year, it was reported that researchers in China’s military academies have published dozens of papers on how to work against the Starlink satellites. 

On Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, Musk (or whoever operates his verified account) posted a note on May 30 that seemed designed to smooth things over a little: “The China space program is far more advanced than most people realize.”

At the core of Musk’s complicated relationship with China is the fact that his different companies have different relationships with the Chinese government. Tesla is exceptionally welcome in the country; Twitter is a big headache for the government and is strictly banned; SpaceX and Starlink are somewhere in between, representing both a security risk and a collaboration opportunity. 

So far, his ownership of the other companies hasn’t caused Tesla to fall out of favor in China. But in this age of sustained US-China tensions, dealing with the Chinese government is a very delicate act for any American company, and Tesla will probably be a bellwether. No matter how much trolling he likes to do in the US, Musk had to be more cautious when he was in China.

What do you think of the trend of American business executives visiting China? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Catch up with China

1. Montana’s TikTok ban could be another “junk internet bill”—highly politicized and unlikely to survive judicial review. (MIT Technology Review)

2. Sunday marked the 34th anniversary of the protest and massacre in Tiananmen Square. 

  • Every year in Hong Kong, people have gathered in a public park to hold a vigil. This year, the vigil was blocked by a food carnival hosted by pro-Beijing groups in the same park. (Wall Street Journal $)
  • People who tried to take candles out were taken away by police. (Reuters $)
  • The vigils and protests have been carried on by people overseas. (CNN)

3. Shein, the Chinese fashion e-commerce company that has attracted a large Gen Z following, has hired Washington lobbyists for the first time, to respond to allegations of forced labor practices. (Politico)

4. Defense officials around the world are gathering in Singapore this week for the high-level Shangri-la Dialogue. (CNBC)

  • Meanwhile, spy masters are having a separate, secret meeting in the same city. (Reuters $)
  • CIA director Bill Burns also had a secret trip to China last month, meeting Beijing’s intelligence officials. (Financial Times $)

5. As Pride month begins, China’s LGBTQ communities are losing their few support groups as they are squeezed by the government to shut down operations. (The Economist $)

6. Local police in China are increasingly dealing with a new type of scam: people are using generative AI tools to impersonate others and request money transfers from the victim’s contacts. (Wall Street Journal $)

Lost in translation

Would you spend $1 a month to have unlimited chats with a simulacrum of your favorite influencer? Xiaoice, a Chinese AI company, just offered this service. Every Thursday from now on, the company will release a new “AI clone” of a Chinese influencer (the first is designed around a 20-something female model named Hu Wenjie, better known by her online alias 半藏森林). Users can converse by text and voice with such AI chatbots. If they spend 30 RMB ($4.22) a month, the “influencer” will double as an office assistant and help with tasks like writing marketing copy. (Why would you want your influencer to do that?) The service has a strong romantic tone: the basic subscription is called the “relationship mode.” For now, the majority of the profits go to the influencer, according to a report by Chinese state broadcaster CCTV.

One more thing

The latest viral social media trend in China is packing a lunch that’s simple and sometimes too bland to eat and calling it 白人饭—literally, “white people food.” It’s surely a dig at the quick lunches in American food culture, but there are also people who say they’re doing it to lose weight or to forgo complicated food prep.

Apple will need to convince developers to build apps for its headset

The “one more thing” Apple announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this year was the industry’s worst-kept secret. The Apple Vision Pro, the tech giant’s gamble on mixed-reality headsets, has received a mixed welcome. The new device is a feat of engineering, but it also comes with an eye-popping $3,499 price tag.

But there’s another issue as well that could prove to be a problem: getting third party developers on board with making native apps.

Apple hopes the Vision Pro will fundamentally change how we interact with our devices—that once freed from the constraints of a smartphone or tablet screen, we’ll embrace “spatial computing,” as the glitzy promo video shows. Gesture and eye tracking identifies where your focus is, allowing you to interact with apps without pressing buttons or a screen.

That could be great for consumers. But it’s a headache for Apple’s ecosystem of app developers. Apple explained that existing apps designed for the iPad will work on visionOS, the operating system powering the Vision Pro, without any changes. But those iPad apps will be displayed within a metaphorical window, losing much of the functionality provided by mixed reality. 

To fully take advantage of the technology and make the leap from the screen to the real world, these apps will need tweaking.

The announcement was a momentous one for René Schulte, head of 3D and quantum communities of practices at the Italian company Reply, which designs 3D environments as part of its business. But he’s worried that much of what was shown in the demo videos made limited use of the opportunities mixed reality should make possible. 

“What I didn’t like was the focus on 2D content,” he says. Schulte has been working with Microsoft’s mixed-reality HoloLens glasses since 2015, and with the Oculus Rift. He thinks some chances to overhaul the user experience for the Vision Pro were missed.

In part that’s down to the challenges involved in redesigning apps for an entirely new interface. Reply published a white paper last year on how to take apps from two dimensions to three. In it, they admit that the change in mentality is not easy. 

“Designers need to learn new methods and skills, and also get used to new tools,” says Schulte. “Designing for 3D is not simply mirroring 2D concepts into three-dimensional space.” Yet that’s just what he saw with—for instance—the presentation of Adobe Lightroom and Microsoft Office.

Denys Zhadanov is a board member and former vice president of Readdle, a Ukrainian development company that produces a suite of popular productivity apps for iOS. He’s enthusiastic about the promise of the Vision Pro, but he recognizes that it’ll require retooling Readdle’s apps. 

“We do have in our apps a lot of custom elements, so we will have to customize that and spend some time adjusting to match all of the things to run smoothly on Vision Pro,” he says. Nevertheless, he sees the augmented-reality options made available by the Vision Pro as useful for his company’s apps. “I’ll need more time to explore those ideas,” he says, “but I think the device itself is phenomenal.” The imminent release of a software development kit (SDK) for the Vision Pro will help, he adds. (Apple did not respond to a request to comment for this story.)

But even with that support, some developers are uncertain about how to proceed. “I think the cost will be a huge issue for consumer apps at this point,” says Dylan McKee, cofounder of Nebula Labs, a mobile app development company based in Newcastle, UK. 

McKee, like others, will have to decide whether the time it will take to retool their apps for a new sort of display is worth the effort, given the potential audience for a product whose price is way out of reach for many. Analysts Wedbush Securities forecast that Apple will ship around 150,000 units of the Vision Pro in 2024. For comparison, the company shipped 55 million iPhones in the first three months of 2023. 

Zhadanov believes Apple is positioning the first version of the Vision Pro as “a toy for the middle class and upwards.” That will dictate the potential use cases for Readdle’s apps on the Vision Pro, and the design choices they make.

Still, with the small shipment numbers forecast, McKee will be shying away from expending lots of effort on the Vision Pro. “From my personal perspective, only one or two of the apps we build make sense to port to it, really,” he says. One is an elite sports coaching app where players could benefit from real-time 3D analysis. The other is a medical training app. 

“I think the virtual simulations of certain training scenarios could be invaluable,” says McKee. “But both of these are niche products compared to the consumer apps we produce.”

That wasn’t Google I/O — it was Google AI

Things got weird at yesterday’s Google I/O conference right from the jump, when the duck hit the stage.  

The day began with a musical performance described as a “generative AI experiment featuring Dan Deacon and Google’s MusicLM, Phenaki, and Bard AI tools.” It wasn’t clear exactly how much of it was machine-made and how much was human. There was a long, lyrically rambling dissertation about meeting a duck with lips. Deacon informed the audience that we were all in a band called Chiptune and launched into a song with various chiptune riffs layered on top of each other. Later he had a song about oat milk? I believe the lyrics were entirely AI generated. Someone wearing a duck suit with lipstick came out and danced on stage. It was all very confusing. 

Then again, everything about life in the AI era is a bit confusing and weird. And this was, no doubt, the AI show. It was Google I/O as Google AI. So much so that on Twitter, the internet’s comment section, person after person used #GoogleIO to complain about all the AI talk, and exhorted Google to get on with it and get to the phones. (There was an eagerly anticipated new phone, the Pixel Fold. It folds.) 

Yet when Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who once ran the company’s efforts with Android, stepped on stage, he made it clear what he was there to talk about. It wasn’t a new phone—it was AI. He opened by going straight at the ways AI is in everything the company does now. With generative AI, he said, “we are reimagining all our core products, including Search.” 

I don’t think that’s quite right. 

At Google in 2023, it seems pretty clear that AI itself now is the core product. Or at least it’s the backbone of that product, a key ingredient that manifests itself in different forms. As my colleague Melissa Heikkilä put it in her report on the company’s efforts: Google is throwing generative AI at everything

The company made this point in one demo after another, all morning long. A Gmail demo showed how generative AI can compose an elaborate email to an airline to help you get a refund. The new Magic Editor in Google Photos will not only remove unwanted elements but reposition people and objects in photos, make the sky brighter and bluer, and then adjust the lighting in the photo so that all that doctoring looks natural. 

In Docs, the AI will create a full job description from just a few words. It will generate spreadsheets. Help you plan your vacation in Search, adjust the tone of your text messages to be more professional (or more personable), give you an “immersive view” in Maps, summarize your email, write computer code, seamlessly translate lip-sync videos. It is so deeply integrated into not only the Android operating system but the hardware itself that Google now makes “the only phone with AI at its center,” as Google’s Rick Osterloh said in describing the G2 chip. Phew. 

Google I/O is a highly, highly scripted event. For months now the company has faced criticism that its AI efforts were being outpaced by the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft Bing. Alarm bells were sounding internally, too. Today felt like a long-planned answer to that. Taken together, the demos came across as a kind of flex—a way to show what the company has under the hood and how it can deploy that technology throughout its existing, massively popular products (Pichai noted that the company has five different products with more than 2 billion users). 

And yet at the same time, it is clearly trying to walk a line, showing off what it can do but in ways that won’t, you know, freak everyone out.

Three years ago, the company forced out Timnit Gebru, the co-lead of its ethical AI team, essentially over a paper that raised concerns about the dangers of large language models. Gebru’s concerns have since become mainstream. Her departure, and the fallout from it, marked a turning point in the conversation about the dangers of unchecked AI. One would hope Google learned from it; from her. 

And then, just last week, Geoffrey Hinton announced he was stepping down from Google, in large part so he’d be free to sound the alarm bell about the dire consequences of rapid advancements in AI that he fears could soon enable it to surpass human intelligence. (Or, as Hinton put it, it is “quite conceivable that humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence.”) 

And so, I/O yesterday was a far cry from the event in 2018, when the company gleefully demonstrated Duplex, showcasing how Google Assistant could make automated calls to small businesses without ever letting the people on those calls know they were interacting with an AI. It was an incredible demo. And one that made very many people deeply uneasy.

Again and again at this year’s I/O, we heard about responsibility. James Manyika, who leads the company’s technology and society program, opened by talking about the wonders AI has wrought, particularly around protein folding, but was quick to transition to the ways the company is thinking about misinformation, noting how it would watermark generated images and alluding to guardrails to prevent their misuse. 

There was a demo of how Google can deploy image provenance to counter misinformation, debunking an image search effectively by showing the first time it (in the example on stage, a fake photo purporting to show that the moon landing was a hoax) was indexed. It was a little bit of grounding amidst all the awe and wonder, operating at scale. 

And then … on to the phones. The new Google Pixel Fold scored the biggest applause line of the day. People like gadgets.

The phone may fold, but for me it was among the least mind-bending things I saw all day. And in my head, I kept returning to one of the earliest examples we saw: a photo of a woman standing in front of some hills and a waterfall

Magic Editor erased her backpack strap. Cool! And it also made the cloudy sky look a lot more blue. Reinforcing this, in another example—this time with a child sitting on a bench holding balloons—Magic Editor once again made the day brighter and then adjusted all the lighting in the photos so the sunshine would look more natural. More real than real.

How far do we want to go here? What’s the end goal we are aiming for? Ultimately, do we just skip the vacation altogether and generate some pretty, pretty pictures? Can we supplant our memories with sunnier, more idealized versions of the past? Are we making reality better? Is everything more beautiful? Is everything better? Is this all very, very cool? Or something else? Something we haven’t realized yet?

Why it’s so hard to tell porn spam from Chinese state bots

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

A few weeks ago, at the peak of China’s protests against stringent zero-covid policies, people were shocked to find that searching for major Chinese cities on Twitter led to an endless stream of ads for hookup or escort services in Chinese. At the time, people suspected this was a tactic deployed by the Chinese government to poison the search results and prevent people from accessing protest information. 

But this spam content may not have had anything to do with the Chinese government after all, according to a report published on Monday by the Stanford Internet Observatory. “While the spam did drown out legitimate protest-related content, there is no evidence that it was designed to do so, nor that it was a deliberate effort by the Chinese government,” wrote David Thiel, the report’s author. 

Instead, they were likely just the usual commercial spam bots that have plagued Twitter forever. These particular accounts exist to attract the attention of Chinese users who go on foreign networks to access porn.

So the “significant uptick” in spam was just a coincidence? The short answer is: very likely. There are two major reasons why Thiel does not think the bots are related to the Chinese government.

First of all, these accounts have been posting spam for a long time. And they sent out even more tweets, and more consistently, before the protests broke out, according to a data analysis on the activities of over 600,000 accounts from November 15 to 29. Another analysis shows they’ve also continued to push out spam even as discussions of the protests have died down. 

Check out these two charts (for reference, the protests peaked around November 27):

A line chart showing consistent spam tweets between November 15 and November 29. Above the chart it says this is an analysis of 7,541,382 total tweets.
A line chart showing increasing spam tweets between November 29 and December 4. Above the chart it says this is an analysis of 6,088,596 total tweets.

So did it just feel as if spam activity spiked during the protests? This graph shows that many more bot accounts were in fact created in November: 

A bar chart showing that spam accounts created in November largely outnumbers accounts created in the past months.

But Thiel emphasizes that content moderation takes time. People tend to ignore the effect called “survivorship bias”: older spam content and accounts are constantly being removed from the platform, but researchers don’t have data on suspended accounts. So a graph like this one only shows accounts that survived Twitter’s spam filters. That’s why November’s spike looks so big: they are new accounts created most recently to replace their dead peers and are still standing—but not all will survive, so they wouldn’t be there if we were to revisit this graph in, say, a few months. In other words, if you conducted a data analysis right after the protests, it would certainly seem that this kind of spam just started recently. But it’s not necessarily the full truth.  

Secondly, if the spam accounts were meant to bury information about the protests, they did a pretty poor job. While escort-ad spam featured many Chinese city names as keywords and hashtags, Thiel found that they did not target the hashtags actually used to discuss the protests, like #A4Revolution or #ChinaProtest2022, “which is what you would assume the government would be interested in jumping on if they were trying to silence things,” he tells me. Of the about 30,000 tweets he analyzed containing these more influential hashtags, “there’s no spam to speak of in there.”

“People tend to jump to a state explanation for things just because the content is in Chinese,” he says. “Sure, China’s done tons of online inauthentic operations before. But I don’t think the default assumption should be [that] the state is behind this.” 

Given all this, Thiel believes that the porn ads during this time were probably just run-of-the-mill commercial spamming, which can actually be quite lucrative. Because of the more rigid porn censors on domestic platforms, Chinese people often seek alternative sources for porn, including using innovative outlets like Steam or just using a plain old VPN to access international platforms like Twitter, which is known for being one of the mainstream platforms more tolerant of sexual content. 

That makes Twitter a prime space for sex-work ads—and, of course, scams. Reporters from the New York Times talked to an online advertising company behind such spam, which charged $1,400 for a monthlong campaign. Some of these accounts may lead to real sex services or access to “premium group chats,” where porn content is shared. Others are fraudulent; as Chinese internet users have exposed, they may ask you to pay upfront online for potential services, in the form of things like “transportation fees.” Once they extract as much money as possible from you, the scammers will cut off all communications. In fact, there are even Twitter accounts in Chinese (NSFW!) dedicated to exposing such scammers and the relevant accounts. 

But not everyone knows the context of how Twitter is used by Chinese people to access porn, or that such spam has existed for a long time. So I don’t blame anyone for suspecting that the government was involved. In the end, I think there are two main reasons why people easily bought the assumption that the spam accounts were part of China’s propaganda machine.

As Thiel said, the Chinese government has been behind many Twitter manipulation campaigns in the past, deploying fake personas, automated activities, and targeted harassment. Back in 2019, for instance, it used spam accounts to disseminate pro-China messages and attack Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters. Some of those accounts had posted extensive porn content—sounds familiar, hah?

But Elise Thomas, a senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who analyzed the 2019 campaign, tells me that was a totally different situation. She found bot accounts that had been used for commercial porn spam and were later sold to Chinese government actors to push political messages, without deleting the account history: “They might buy old commercial accounts, and some of the commercial accounts had done porn, spam, cryptocurrency, and all sorts of other stuff.” So it was not the Chinese government that was deliberately posting porn, but the previous owners of the bots.

Obviously, the state’s tactics could evolve, but it’s important not to give the state too much credit for its capacity to meddle with social media.

Last but not least, it’s just generally hard to tie any social media activity to a foreign government when researchers don’t have access to internal company analytics. 

“Only social media companies can definitively link social media accounts to the Chinese government based on technical indicators to which they only have access. It is very difficult to distinguish between random accounts and possibly state-affiliated ones based solely on open-source methods,” says Albert Zhang, who researches Chinese disinformation at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. “We make probabilistic assessments based on behavioral patterns found in previous Chinese government campaigns that Twitter and Meta have publicly disclosed.” 

Before Elon Musk acquired Twitter, it was one of the best social networks in terms of being transparent to outside researchers and sharing data with them, according to the researchers I spoke with. But even then, Twitter still withheld the internal data it used to determine whether an account was linked to a foreign government. 

Now, as the platform gets into bigger messes, this kind of academic collaboration is increasingly endangered. “That’s the big unknown right now. Normally with this kind of situation, we would be working with Twitter and seeing if they had seen this campaign, seeing what might be able to be done to tamp it down and prevent this kind of thing,” Thiel tells me. But after the mass exodus of Twitter staffers, no employees that used to work with the Stanford Internet Observatory are still on the team. These researchers have no direct contact at the company now.

Identifying and exposing foreign governments’ influence campaigns is already a hard job. Without the collaboration between tech platforms and researchers, it will be even more difficult to correctly hold governments accountable. Will it ever get better under Musk?

Did you think these accounts were linked to the Chinese government? Why or why not? I’d love to hear your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Catch up with China

1. China announced the first two deaths from covid since disbanding much of its zero-covid infrastructure. (Associated Press)

  • But many more deaths have likely gone unreported. One crematorium worker in Beijing said the facility had received over 30 bodies with covid in one day. (Financial Times $)

2. China is planning to pour another 1 trillion yuan ($143 billion) into subsidizing domestic chip industries. (Reuters $)

3. After the Chinese government agreed to let the US audit whether some Chinese companies are making military products, the US Commerce Department added 36 Chinese entities to the trade blacklist—but, in a win for China, removed 25 from the unverified list. (Financial Times $)

4. Using jokes, old photos, and protest news, Chinese Instagram meme accounts are creating a bridge between diaspora communities and Chinese youths at home. (Wired $)

5. Both national and state lawmakers in the US are pushing to ban TikTok from government phones. (South China Morning Post $)

6. A Chinese company tried to launch the world’s first methane-fueled rocket. It failed. (Space News)

7. Ford is working on a complex arrangement to build a battery factory in Michigan along with China’s battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology—without triggering geopolitical concerns. (Bloomberg $)

8. Acting tough on China is one of the few things both parties can agree on in Washington. But Cornell government professor Jessica Chen Weiss, who spent a year in the Biden administration, is publicly challenging that consensus. (New Yorker $)

  • The Biden administration launched an interdepartmental coordination mechanism named “China House.” (Politico)

9. Writer Sally Rooney is gaining literary fans in China, both because Chinese youths see themselves in her work and because her Irish nationality has shielded her from worsening US-China relations. (The Economist $)

Lost in translation

As cities across China struggle to deal with a covid infection surge, OTC fever medicine has become the hottest commodity. But how did such a common medicine as ibuprofen sell out so widely and so fast? 

Industry insiders told Chinese health-care news publication Saibailan that many domestic pharmaceutical companies were disincentivized from manufacturing ibuprofen this year because until China relaxed its covid control measures in December, Chinese citizens were heavily restricted from purchasing fever medicine. Even though demand is up now, the ibuprofen supply chain needs time to recover and respond. 

To speed things up and ensure medicine supply, local governments are stepping in. Some have asked pharmacies to ration the drug and sell no more than six capsules to each customer. Other governments are even taking over pharmaceutical factories to make sure products are supplied to local patients first before they’re sold to other regions in China.

One more thing

Don’t miss the most viral Chinese internet slang of this year, a list put together by a local publication in Shanghai. The top 10 is a mix of covid-era creations like 团长 (tuan zhang), the volunteers organizing bulk-orders of groceries during Shanghai’s two-month lockdown, and social media phenomena like 嘴替 (zui ti), which means someone who can publicly speak out on things normies don’t dare to say or can’t articulate. And the top one is also the one I find most bewildering: 栓Q (shuan Q), which is really just a dramatic way to pronounce “thank you” when people feel speechless or fed up. Maybe internet trends don’t need to make sense. Just saying.

Former Twitter employees fear the platform might only last weeks

Recently departed Twitter staff have told MIT Technology Review they worry that the platform has weeks to live judging from current staffing levels, mass resignations overnight, and the morale of those few who remain. 

With some within Twitter estimating that 75% of those remaining plan to quit after Elon Musk sent an email informing them that they “will need to be extremely hardcore” and must click “Yes” on a Google form to remain employed, the company is likely to be sorely short of key staff in the days to come. Last night, Twitter told its staff that all offices were locked and access suspended after it became clear how few were willing to remain on those terms. In a tweet last night, Musk said that “the best people are staying, so I’m not super worried.”

For those who escaped the madness earlier, either through layoffs or after being fired for insubordination, it’s a troubling development. “You’re seeing you can only push the workers so far before they’re going to revolt,” says Melissa Ingle, a senior data scientist contractor who was laid off by Musk this weekend. “These people have options. They’re successful in their careers. They don’t want to be put through this.”

Ingle worries that the wide-scale revolt—triggered by Musk’s “hardcore” ultimatum—will signal the end of Twitter without drastic changes. “There’s just not enough technical expertise anymore to keep the site running,” she says. “He’s afraid of his own people. Unless major changes are made, I don’t see how it lasts the month.”

She’s not alone in that assessment. One former Twitter engineer, who was fired by Musk as part of a crackdown on those who escaped his initial layoffs but were outspoken in their criticism of him, says the end “could be minutes, could be weeks.”

“It’s the unanticipated problems that’ll break things badly,” says the engineer, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “There’s a good amount of resilience built into the infrastructure, but big problems at this scale are never what one could ever expect.”

The former employee is unsurprised that so many others have said they’ve had enough. “It was an easy choice, given the way he’s been treating people,” he says. Those who remain, he believes, are likely those who must remain employed for an H1-B immigration visa, or for private insurance purposes. But they’re few and far between. Just to ensure basic functionality, Ingle believes, “many more engineers will need to be hired.”

MIT Technology Review has previously reported how one Twitter insider believes the company’s systems will degrade over time. Platformer’s Zoe Schiffer reported overnight that many employees who maintained Twitter’s critical infrastructure have also resigned in the last 24 hours. The fact that Twitter offices are now closed could mean it would be more difficult for staff to triage and fix any infrastructure issues that arise before the office’s planned reopening on November 21. 

Musk did not respond to a request for comment. Twitter’s own communications team has been massively reduced in the recent layoffs.

“There will need to be major changes,” says Ingle. Already, we’re seeing Musk rowing back on some of his more draconian measures. After saying in an all-staff email on November 9 that “remote work is no longer allowed, unless you have an exception,” he is now saying that staff need to have in-person meetings with their colleagues monthly at a minimum.

“He’s going to need to get more people back in who know this system, who are able to ramp up in a hurry—otherwise we’re going to start to see major outages,” says Ingle. That will leave those who have recently departed—or intend to leave—in a quandary. Many current and former Twitter employees tell MIT Technology Review that although they are deeply unhappy at the way the company is presently being run, they are also conscious that Twitter has an outsize role in our society and is a living historical record of our lives.

That conflict is something Ingle is seeing in her group chats with those colleagues who currently remain. “People are just kind of trying to hang on by a thread,” she says. “There’s a sense of loyalty, but morale was already lower than I’d ever seen it in my career. People don’t feel respect. They don’t feel like their work is respected. And it’s just hard to keep people motivated in that kind of environment.”

“Look, I’m an optimist,” says Ingle. “I think there’s a possibility he’ll turn it around, but it’s very slim.” Even with that glimmer of optimism, she and her unnamed engineering colleague aren’t confident that the platform will last long shorn of so much staff. “All signs point to some catastrophic failure of the system,” she says, “and very soon.”

Twitter’s potential collapse could wipe out vast records of recent human history

Almost from the time the first tweet was posted in 2006, Twitter has played an important role in world events. The platform has been used to record everything from the Arab Spring to the ongoing war in Ukraine. It’s also captured our public conversations for years. 

But experts are worried that if Elon Musk tanks the company, these rich seams of media and conversation could be lost forever. Given his admission to employees in a November 10 call that Twitter could face bankruptcy, it’s a real and present risk.

Musk himself acknowledges that Twitter is a public forum, and it’s this fact that makes the potential loss of the platform so significant. Twitter has become integral to civilization today. It’s a place where people document war crimes, discuss key issues, and break and report on news.

It’s where the US raid that would result in Osama bin Laden’s death was first announced. It’s where people get updates on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s where news of the downing of flight MH17, a Malaysia Airlines plane that was likely shot down by pro-Russia forces in Ukraine in 2014, first surfaced. It is a living, breathing historical document. And there’s real concern it could disappear soon.

“If Twitter was to ‘go in the morning’, let’s say, all of this—all of the firsthand evidence of atrocities or potential war crimes, and all of this potential evidence—would simply disappear,” says Ciaran O’Connor, senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a global think tank. Information gathered using open-source intelligence, known as OSINT, has been used to support prosecutions for war crimes and acts as a record of events long after the human memory fades.

Part of what makes Twitter’s potential collapse uniquely challenging is that the “digital public square” has been built on the servers of a private company, says  O’Connor’s colleague Elise Thomas, senior OSINT analyst with the ISD. It’s a problem we’ll have to deal with many times over the coming decades, she says: “This is perhaps the first really big test of that.”

Twitter’s ubiquity, its adoption by nearly a quarter of a billion users in the last 16 years, and its status as a de facto public archive, has made it a gold mine of information, says Thomas. 

“In one sense, this actually represents an enormous opportunity for future historians—we’ve never had the capacity to capture this much data about any previous era in history,” she explains. But that enormous scale presents a huge storage problem for organizations.

For eight years, the US Library of Congress took it upon itself to maintain a public record of all tweets, but it stopped in 2018, instead selecting only a small number of accounts’ posts to capture.  “It never, ever worked,” says William Kilbride, executive director of the Digital Preservation Coalition. The data the library was expected to store was too vast, the volume coming out of the firehose too great. “Let me put that in context: it’s the Library of Congress. They had some of the best expertise on this topic. If the Library of Congress can’t do it, that tells you something quite important,” he says.

That’s problematic, because Twitter is teeming with significant content from the past 16 years that could help tomorrow’s historians understand the world of today. 

“In a way, Twitter has become a kind of aggregator of information,” says Eliot Higgins, founder of open-source investigators Bellingcat, who helped bring the perpetrators who downed MH17 to justice. “A lot of this stuff you see from Ukraine, the footage comes from Telegram channels that other people are following, but they’re sharing it on Twitter.” Twitter has made it easier to categorize and consume content from almost any niche in the world, tapping into a real-time news feed of relevant information from both massive organizations and small, independent voices. Its absence would be keenly felt.

The disappearance of huge volumes of information from the internet is not a new problem. In 2017, YouTube was accused of harming investigators’  ability to pinpoint alleged crimes against humanity in Syria by permanently deleting accounts that posted videos from Syrian cities. It eventually reneged, realizing the importance it played as a host of historical information. 

“I don’t think that’s going to happen with Elon Musk,” says Higgins.  (Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment asking if he would assure or assist in the permanent storage of Twitter’s history of posts in the event of bankruptcy. Twitter, as has now been extensively reported, no longer has a communication team after mass layoffs.)

It’s not just OSINT researchers who are worried. US public agencies’ concern about the loss of their verified status highlights the fact that lots of official statements by governments and public bodies are now made on Twitter first. “There’s no indication that those formal records of government agencies have ever been archived, or indeed how they’d go about doing that,” says Kilbride. 

Many users have taken it upon themselves to independently back up their data, while the Internet Archive can be used to permanently store snapshots of Twitter web pages in a more reliable place than Twitter’s own servers. But both methods are  not without their own issues: multimedia often isn’t stored alongside such methods of archiving tweets—something that would affect the vast numbers of accounts posting images and videos from Iran’s revolution, or documenting Russia’s invasion of Twitter—while accessing the information easily requires knowing the exact URL of any given tweet. “You may have trouble finding that if it’s not already been preserved in some way somewhere else on the internet,” says Higgins.

Some users are relying on third-party services usually used to make long Twitter threads more decipherable, such as Thread Reader—but trying to turn those into archiving tools is not an ideal solution either. “The companies behind those services are almost certainly smaller and more transient than Twitter itself, and there’s no real reason to think the content will be preserved forever there either—especially as once Twitter is gone, so is the Twitter thread unrolling company’s business model,” says Thomas.

“There’s a nice way to turn the lights out,” pleads Kilbride, who asks that if Twitter goes under, Musk doesn’t pull the plug immediately. “A managed, structured close-down to the service has to be preferred to the chaos we’ve got now,” he says. 

Thomas doesn’t have a good solution to the problem, and as with much of Twitter at present, the outlook isn’t exactly rosy, she says. “We’re going to lose such a lot of digital history if Twitter goes kaput without warning.”

Note: we updated the headline

Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks

On November 4, just hours after Elon Musk fired half of the 7,500 employees previously working at Twitter, some people began to see small signs that something was wrong with everyone’s favorite hellsite. And they saw it through retweets.

Twitter introduced retweets in 2009, turning an organic thing people were already doing—pasting someone else’s username and tweet, preceded by the letters RT—into a software function. In the years since, the retweet and its distant cousin the quote tweet (which launched in April 2015) have become two of the most common mechanics on Twitter.

But on Friday, a few users who pressed the retweet button saw the years roll back to 2009. Manual retweets, as they were called, were back.

The return of the manual retweet wasn’t Elon Musk’s latest attempt to appease users. Instead, it was the first public crack in the edifice of Twitter’s code base—a blip on the seismometer that warns of a bigger earthquake to come.

A massive tech platform like Twitter is built upon very many interdependent parts. “The larger catastrophic failures are a little more titillating, but the biggest risk is the smaller things starting to degrade,” says Ben Krueger,  a site reliability engineer who has more than two decades of experience in the tech industry. “These are very big, very complicated systems.” Krueger says one 2017 presentation from Twitter staff includes a statistic suggesting that more than half the back-end infrastructure was dedicated to storing data.

While many of Musk’s detractors may hope the platform goes through the equivalent of thermonuclear destruction, the collapse of something like Twitter happens gradually. For those who know, gradual breakdowns are a sign of concern that a larger crash could be imminent. And that’s what’s happening now.

It’s the small things

Whether it’s manual RTs appearing for a moment before retweets slowly morph into their standard form, ghostly follower counts that race ahead of the number of people actually following you, or replies that simply refuse to load, small bugs are appearing at Twitter’s periphery. Even Twitter’s rules, which Musk linked to on November 7, went offline temporarily under the load of millions of eyeballs. In short, it’s becoming unreliable. 

“Sometimes you’ll get notifications that are a little off,” says one engineer currently working at Twitter, who’s concerned about the way the platform is reacting after vast swathes of his colleagues who were previously employed to keep the site running smoothly were fired. (That last sentence is why the engineer has been granted anonymity to talk for this story.) After struggling with downtime during its “Fail Whale” days, Twitter eventually became lauded for its team of site reliability engineers, or SREs. Yet this team has been decimated in the aftermath of Musk’s takeover. “It’s small things, at the moment, but they do really add up as far as the perception of stability,” says the engineer.

The small suggestions of something wrong will amplify and multiply as time goes on, he predicts—in part because the skeleton staff remaining to handle these issues will quickly burn out. “Round-the-clock is detrimental to quality, and we’re already kind of seeing this,” he says. 

Twitter’s remaining engineers have largely been tasked with keeping the site stable over the last few days, since the new CEO decided to get rid of a significant chunk of the staff maintaining its code base. As the company tries to return to some semblance of normalcy, more of their time will be spent addressing Musk’s (often taxing) whims for new products and features, rather than keeping what’s already there running.

This is particularly problematic, says Krueger, for a site like Twitter, which can have unforeseen spikes in user traffic and interest. Krueger contrasts Twitter with online retail sites, where companies can prepare for big traffic events like Black Friday with some predictability. “When it comes to Twitter, they have the possibility of having a Black Friday on any given day at any time of the day,” he says. “At any given day, some news event can happen that can have significant impact on the conversation.” Responding to that is harder to do when you lay off up to 80% of your SREs—a figure Krueger says has been bandied about within the industry but which MIT Technology Review has been unable to confirm. The Twitter engineer agreed that the percentage sounded “plausible.”

That engineer doesn’t see a route out of the issue—other than reversing the layoffs (which the company has reportedly already attempted to roll back somewhat). “If we’re going to be pushing at a breakneck pace, then things will break,” he says. “There’s no way around that. We’re accumulating technical debt much faster than before—almost as fast as we’re accumulating financial debt.” 

The list grows longer

He presents a dystopian future where issues pile up as the backlog of maintenance tasks and fixes grows longer and longer. “Things will be broken. Things will be broken more often. Things will be broken for longer periods of time. Things will be broken in more severe ways,” he says. “Everything will compound until, eventually, it’s not usable.”

Twitter’s collapse into an unusable wreck is some time off, the engineer says, but the telltale signs of process rot are already there. It starts with the small things: “Bugs in whatever part of whatever client they’re using; whatever service in the back end they’re trying to use. They’ll be small annoyances to start, but as the back-end fixes are being delayed, things will accumulate until people will eventually just give up.”

Krueger says that Twitter won’t blink out of life, but we’ll start to see a greater number of tweets not loading, and accounts coming into and out of existence seemingly at a whim. “I would expect anything that’s writing data on the back end to possibly have slowness, timeouts, and a lot more subtle types of failure conditions,” he says. “But they’re often more insidious. And they also generally take a lot more effort to track down and resolve. If you don’t have enough engineers, that’s going to be a significant problem.” 

The juddering manual retweets and faltering follower counts are indications that this is already happening. Twitter engineers have designed fail-safes that the platform can fall back on so that the functionality doesn’t go totally offline but cut-down versions are provided instead. That’s what we’re seeing, says Krueger.

Alongside the minor malfunctions, the Twitter engineer believes that there’ll be significant outages on the horizon, thanks in part to Musk’s drive to reduce Twitter’s cloud computing server load in an attempt to claw back up to $3 million a day in infrastructure costs. Reuters reports that this project, which came from Musk’s war room, is called the “Deep Cuts Plan.” One of Reuters’s sources called the idea “delusional,” while Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey, says that “unless they’ve massively overengineered the current system, the risk of poorer capacity and availability seems a logical conclusion.”

Brain drain

Meanwhile, when things do go kaput, there’s no longer the institutional knowledge to quickly fix issues as they arise. “A lot of the people I saw who were leaving after Friday have been there nine, 10, 11 years, which is just ridiculous for a tech company,” says the Twitter engineer. As those individuals walked out of Twitter offices, decades of knowledge about how its systems worked disappeared with them. (Those within Twitter, and those watching from the sidelines, have previously argued that Twitter’s knowledge base is overly concentrated in the minds of a handful of programmers, some of whom have been fired.)

Unfortunately, teams stripped back to their bare bones (according to those remaining at Twitter) include the tech writers’ team. “We had good documentation because of [that team],” says the engineer. No longer. When things go wrong, it’ll be harder to find out what has happened. 

Getting answers will be harder externally as well. The communications team has been cut down from between 80 and 100 to just two people, according to one former team member who MIT Technology Review spoke to. “There’s too much for them to do, and they don’t speak enough languages to deal with the press as they need to,” says the engineer.

When MIT Technology Review reached out to Twitter for this story, the email went unanswered.

Musk’s recent criticism of Mastodon, the open-source alternative to Twitter that has piled on users in the days since the entrepreneur took control of the platform, invites the suggestion that those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. The Twitter CEO tweeted, then quickly deleted, a post telling users, “If you don’t like Twitter anymore, there is awesome site [sic] called Masterbatedone [sic].” Accompanying the words was a physical picture of his laptop screen open on Paul Krugman’s Mastodon profile, showing the economics columnist trying multiple times to post. Despite Musk’s attempt to highlight Mastodon’s unreliability, its success has been remarkable: nearly half a million people have signed up since Musk took over Twitter.

It’s happening at the same time that the first cracks in Twitter’s edifice are starting to show. It’s just the beginning, expects Krueger. “I would expect to start seeing significant public-facing problems with the technology within six months,” he says. “And I feel like that’s a generous estimate.”

YouTube wants to take on TikTok and put its Shorts videos on your TV

YouTube Shorts, the video website’s TikTok-like feature, has become one of its latest obsessions, with more than 1.5 billion users watching short-form content on their devices every month.

And now YouTube wants to expand that number by bringing full-screen, vertical videos into your TV, MIT Technology Review can reveal.

From today, users worldwide will see a row of videos from Shorts high up their display on YouTube’s smart TV apps. The videos, which will be integrated into the standard homepage of YouTube’s TV app and will sit alongside longer, landscape videos, are presented on the basis of previous watch history, much as in the YouTube Shorts tab on cell phones and the YouTube website.

“It is challenging taking a format that’s traditionally a mobile format and finding the right way to bring it to life on TV,” says Brynn Evans, UX director for the YouTube app on TV.

The time spent developing the TV app integration is testament to the importance of Shorts to YouTube, says Melanie Fitzgerald, UX director at YouTube Community and Shorts. “Seeing the progression of short-form video over several years, from Vine to Musical.ly to TikTok to Instagram and to YouTube, it’s very clear this format is here to stay.”

One major challenge the designers behind YouTube Shorts’ TV integration had to consider was the extent to which Shorts videos should be allowed to autoplay. At present, the initial design will require viewers to manually scroll through Shorts videos once they’re playing and move on to the next one by pressing the up and down arrows on their TV remote.

“One piece we were playing with was how much do we want this to be a fully lean-back experience, where you turn it on and Shorts cycle through,” says Evans, whose team decided against that option at launch but does not rule out changing future iterations.

The design presents a single Shorts video at a time in the center of the TV screen, surrounded by white space that changes color depending on the overall look of the video.

One thing YouTube didn’t test—at least as of now? Filling the white space with ads. YouTube spokesperson Susan Cadrecha tells MIT Tech Review that the experience will initially be ad-free. The spokesperson did say that ads would likely be added at some point, but how those would be integrated into the Shorts on TV experience was not clear.

Likewise, the YouTube Shorts team is investigating how to integrate comments into TV viewing for future iterations of the app. “For a mobile format like this, you’d be able to maybe use your phone as a companion and leave some comments and they can appear on TV,” says Evans. 

YouTube’s announcement follows TikTok’s own move into developing a TV app. First launched in February 2021 in France, Germany, and the UK and expanded into the United States and elsewhere in November that year, TikTok’s smart TV app hasn’t largely altered how the main app works. (Nor, arguably, has it become an irreplaceable part of people’s living room habits.)

However, the shift to fold Shorts into the YouTube experience on TV suggests how important YouTube feels the short-form model is to its future. “It’s very clearly a battle for attention across devices,” says Andrew A. Rosen, founder and principal at media analyst Parqor. “The arrival of Shorts and TikTok on connected TVs makes the competitive landscape that much more complex.” Having ceded a head start to TikTok, YouTube now seems determined to play catchup.

The team behind the initiative still isn’t fully certain how adding short-form video into the YouTube on TV experience will be embraced. “It still remains to be seen how and when people will consume Shorts,” admits Evans—though she tells MIT Tech Review that informal polling and qualitative surveys, plus tests within the Google community, suggest “a very positive impression of Shorts from people who are watching YouTube on TV.” (YouTube declined to share its own data on much time the average user currently spends watching YouTube content on TV but did point to Nielsen data showing that viewers worldwide spent 700 million hours a day on that activity.)

“Will it be a game-changer in the living room? Yes and no,” says Rosen. “Yes in the sense that it will turn 15-second to 60-second clips into competition for every legacy media streaming service, and Netflix is betting billions on content to be consumed on those same TVs. No, because it’s not primed to become a new default of consumption.”

Twitter may have lost more than a million users since Elon Musk took over

In the days after Elon Musk’s October 27 purchase of Twitter was confirmed by his tweet saying “the bird is freed,” many Twitter users have threatened to leave, unhappy about the new ownership.

People always threaten to leave Twitter and then often fail to follow through—but new data suggests that a significant number of users really are  abandoning the platform this time.

The firm Bot Sentinel, which tracks inauthentic behavior on Twitter by analyzing more than 3.1 million accounts and their activity daily, believes that around 877,000 accounts were deactivated and a further 497,000 were suspended between October 27 and November 1. That’s more than double the usual number.

“We have observed an uptick in people deactivating their accounts and also Twitter suspending accounts,” says Christopher Bouzy, Bot Sentinel’s founder. 

Bouzy and Bot Sentinel arrived at their numbers by looking at the proportion of users they analyze who had deactivated their accounts or been suspended after Musk’s Twitter takeover, and then applying that percentage to Twitter’s overall user base, which currently stands at around 237 million “monetizable daily active users”.

From October 27 through November 1, Bot Sentinel found that 11,535 accounts they were monitoring had been deactivated—meaning someone chose to close an account down. A further 6,824 were suspended, which happens when Twitter proactively removes accounts for inactivity, inauthenticity, or violation of site rules. That’s approximately 0.59% of the accounts Bot Sentinel monitors.  In the week before Musk bought Twitter, only 5,958 accounts were deactivated or suspended, suggesting a 208% increase in account losses in the days after the purchase went through. 

“We believe the uptick in deactivations is a result of people upset with Elon Musk purchasing Twitter and deciding to deactivate their accounts in protest,” says Bouzy, pointing to the anecdotal evidence of people posting about quitting the site. 

Manoel Ribeiro, an academic at EPFL Lausanne in Switzerland who studies niche internet communities including the alt-right and how they are affected by moderation policies and algorithms, agrees. “There seems to be indeed an attempt from many to migrate to other platforms, such as Mastodon,” he says.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Elon Musk did not immediately respond to an email.

Bouzy believes the uptick in the number of account suspensions is in part due to hate speech from a proportion of the user base testing what they can and can’t say on the site now that it is under Musk’s control. “We also believe the increase in suspensions is from Twitter taking action on accounts purposely violating Twitter’s rules to see if they can push the limits of ‘free speech,’” he says. It’s unknown what proportion of those suspended by Twitter have been judged to be inauthentic (i.e., bots) as opposed to breaching the platform’s rules on acceptable speech.

Separate analysis by the Network Contagion Research Institute, a research group, shows that use of the N-word on Twitter increased by almost 500% in the 12 hours after Musk announced he had completed the deal. Simultaneously, various examples of derogatory “copypasta” (blocks of text copied and pasted into posts, popular with users of image boards like 4chan), are being posted with impunity.

The uptick in hate speech comes right as the company has frozen access to content moderation tools for much of its trust and safety team. Only 15 people have access to tools that enable them to remove posts, according to Bloomberg; hundreds usually have that ability. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, tweeted that the move was planned as part of the corporate transition, to “reduce opportunities for insider risk.” The platform also has automated moderation tools that work alongside human moderators, Ribeiro points out.

For Savvas Zannettou, assistant professor at Delft University of Technology and a core member of the iDRAMA Lab, a multi-institution research group that analyzes fringe online communities, it’s the first indication of a larger problem for Twitter. “I think this is the first chapter of the mass exodus from the platform,” he says. “I believe that as the new Twitter starts rolling out changes, it’s likely that there will be additional waves of users leaving Twitter.”

Bouzy also reckons the hostile environment on Twitter will promote user attrition in the long run. “I believe if users continue to deactivate their accounts en masse, it will become a significant problem for the platform,” he says. “If left-leaning and marginalized people leave the platform, Twitter will not differ from Parler or Truth Social.”

Elon Musk’s plans to revive Vine face one big problem: the reason it closed originally

Good news, everyone: Vine is (probably) coming back. The much beloved wacky short-form-video-sharing app had a short life in the limelight from 2012 to 2017, when it was cut off in its prime (as many would have it). That’s helped ensure that it holds a space in many millennials’ hearts as the last glorious stand of the social web before it became tarnished and commoditized and every app started looking the same. Vine was what the internet could have been, rather than what it became.

“There are few things the internet can agree on, but almost everyone misses Vine with an intense nostalgia,” says Jessica Maddox, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama College of Communication and Information Sciences. 

The fact that so many hold a candle for Vine may well be why Elon Musk, who is facing criticism as he takes over Twitter and enacts dramatic staff cuts and a worrying swing in the social media platform’s policies, has mooted rejuvenating the app.

Like many of Musk’s decisions throughout his takeover of Twitter, it came to light first through a poll of his followers on Twitter. Late on October 31, Musk asked whether he should bring back the app, which Twitter bought in 2012 before it was launched. More than 4 million people have voted so far, with 69.4% of them saying yes.

Hours later, Axios reported that Twitter’s engineers have been instructed to examine the code base behind Vine ahead of a planned relaunch later this year. (Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) The news of a potential renaissance was welcomed with wariness by Sara Beykpour, who was the technical lead for the Android version of Vine. 

“This code is 6+ years old. Some of it is 10+,” tweeted Beykpour, who originally wrote the blog announcing Vine’s arrival on Android. “You don’t want to look there. If you want to revive Vine, you should start over.” (Beykpour did not respond to a request for comment.)

It’s not just the prospect of wrangling decade-old code into shippable shape that should dissuade Musk from relaunching Vine—even if there’s widespread public support. The app, no matter how much it rides the wave of nostalgia, is unlikely to cut through to users who have since moved on to TikTok, the app’s spiritual successor. “Platforms have evolved since Vine—it’s no longer about the social app,” says Carlos Pacheco, a social media audience and monetization consultant. “TikTok’s model of being an entertainment-curated app algorithm and platform is the new standard.”

As well as bringing the old code into 2022, Twitter engineers tasked with resuscitating Vine will have to figure out how to fight fire with fire when it comes to TikTok. TikTok’s billion-strong user base far outpowers Twitter’s few hundred million monthly active users. And its success has largely been down to its unparalleled ability to serve users content they want to see before they know they want to see it. It has done that through machine-learning algorithms trained for years in a Chinese sister app, Douyin. 

The gap in algorithmic might between TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and its competitors has so far been what’s kept Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts fighting for second place—and a relaunched Vine is unlikely to do much better. Instead, it could follow in the footsteps of Byte, Vine cofounder Dom Hofmann’s attempt to bring back the spirit of Vine, which has gone through two rebrands since it was announced in 2018 and launched in 2020.

Much has been written about Vine’s untimely demise, but few know it better than Karyn Spencer, Vine’s first and only head of creator development from August 2015 to the app’s closure in January 2017.

Weeks into her job at Vine, Spencer was asked to try to stem a decline in user numbers and a revolt among its biggest creators, who demanded $1.2 million each to create videos for the app. There was one major problem: Twitter  was wary about giving any of its Vine stars cash for content, fearing that it would set a precedent for paying creators to publish on its platforms, including Twitter itself. The concern was that giving 18 of Vine’s biggest names cash to create posts would open the floodgates, and millions of Twitter influencers with decent followings would line up for their payouts.

Both Vine and Twitter were making losses at the time, and Twitter executives holding the purse strings feared both could quickly start hemorrhaging money to creators. “When those creators came to Vine and said they’d need monetization to keep creating content on the platform, [Twitter bosses] said one of the concerns about putting creator monetization in place for Vine was: ‘What if people wanted to be paid every time they tweeted?’” says Spencer.

She and her team tried to explain to executives that there was a difference in perception of time taken to create both types of content, but it became a terminal problem for Vine under Twitter, says Spencer, who says “there was never a monetization road map” for the app. “The fundamental issue was money,” adds Pacheco. “The creators wanted a partner program similar to that of YouTube. It didn’t happen, so where did the creators go? YouTube.” 

Creators no longer produce work for free. Pacheco says he works with “tons” of content companies currently operating within the YouTube ecosystem who refuse to produce content for YouTube Shorts or TikTok, largely because they can’t guarantee a decent income from it. “Vine collapsed and was shut down by Twitter for several reasons, chief among them high competition and lack of monetization and ad possibilities,” says Maddox.

All of those issues are even more serious today, at a time when the creator industry has become more established and the biggest names on social media platforms are millionaires. “Content creator” is a career—and people do, after a fashion, get paid for tweeting through brand deals and sponsored posts.

“You could not stand up a creator-based video platform today without monetization opportunities,” says Spencer. Nor is it simply a case of “build it and they will come.” “It’s important to keep in mind that creators these days require a good creative product and audience, proper support from the partnership team, and legitimate monetization opportunities,” she adds. At a time when Musk is looking to lose headcount from Twitter to turn the company into a viable business, staffing up those divisions may not be a priority.

Spencer sees politics and Musk himself as the other key variables in the equation—with Musk’s brash public persona potentially putting some off from taking the risk of creating content for yet another app. “But almost every creator I know drives a Tesla,” she says. “I don’t think they’d be opposed to Elon’s involvement.”